Disc Dem

Sunday, 6 March 2016

Disproportional Representation

The Good
Governance Africa (GGA) organisation’s latest journal[1]
contains a special focus report on the quality of local government in South
Africa, which includes their municipal performance index for all 234 local and
metro councils. It makes very interesting reading in that it confirms, among other things, that the
majority of people have lost faith in the ability of their local councillors to
properly represent them.

The journal also
alludes to a lack of constituency accountability as being a factor in the
disconnection between politicians and their voters when it says “....a legislative defect protects
constituency-based town councillors from real accountability to their
electorates. The electoral system at the local government level is hybrid, and
includes an element of constituency-related activities as well as proportional
representation. They then go on later to say “However, once elected, councillors are beholden to the whims of the
party that nominated them. A political party can recall a councillor if it is
displeased with that person for some reason.”

I am now going
to try to unpack the “legislative defect”. First of all, contrary to what politicians
say, you do not vote for “the candidate of your choice”. You actually vote for the
candidate of their choice, namely a
politician who has been selected by other politicians to stand in your ward. We
have no say in the selection process, and in many instances we have no idea
what their qualifications are, or where they were parachuted in from by their
party. The constituency ward vote is
therefore Hobson’s Choice[2]. In essence, nothing more than a party vote
which leaves the ward councillor “beholden
to the whims of the party that nominated them”, rather than beholden to
their voting constituents. Strike 1
against constituency accountability.

The
proportional representation vote goes towards padding a council with additional
politicians based solely upon their party affiliation. Proportional councillors are therefore
entirely dependent upon their parties for a high enough position on the party
list to be assured of a seat in council.

Proportional
councillors have no “constituency-related
activities” and are therefore even more “beholden to the whims of the party that nominated them”. In addition, a ward candidate who loses
their constituency election can still be appointed a councillor because of the
dual candidacy nature of the proportional party list. How democratic is that? The
generally accepted terms for this political practice are cronyism or cadre deployment.
Strike 2 against constituency accountability.

Even though we
may have voted for the ward councillor, “a
political party can recall a councillor if it is displeased with that person
for some reason”. Without any further reference to the electorate, the
party rules supreme. Heaven forbid that
your councillor actually represents your interests when those interests are in
conflict with the party caucus. It does not happen very often, because councillors
know they will suffer sanctions. Strike
3 against constituency accountability.

This unacceptable
“3 strikes” outcome is actually caused by a number of compounding legislative
defects.

Defect 1 Our Constitution dictates
the use of proportional representation in local government, but does not specifically
preclude a ward candidate from also being a proportional candidate. Political
parties frequently use this legislative defect to appoint losing ward candidates
as proportional councillors. This is a deliberate and premeditated circumvention
of the will of the voters, which further serves to entrench the power of a
party over all their councillors.

Defect 2 The Municipal
Structures Act No 117 of 1998 eliminates the need for proportional
representation as envisaged in the Constitution. This Act stipulates that “The Demarcation Board must delimit a
municipality into wards, each having approximately the same number of voters.”
The Board, in conjunction with the Independent Electoral Commission, diligently
conspires to execute this requirement. If you accept the premise that a ward
vote is just a party vote in disguise, it stands to reason that, in the
majority of instances, a voter’s proportional vote will go the same way as their
ward vote. This being true, two votes for the same party across wards of equal
size will result in the same outcome as having only a single ward vote.

In the vast
majority of councils the PR vote therefore serves only to fulfill a
constitutional requirement, and has no bearing on the outcome of political
control. In fact, there are only nine coalitions among the 234 local and metro
councils. Of these nine, there is only
one council where political control would change if PR was eliminated. This essentially translates into having 4158
proportional councillors for the sake of one anomalous municipality that has
only five wards and four proportional councillors of its own.

If you are
still not convinced that the system needs to change then look at the difference
in numbers between the top 20 and bottom 20 municipalities on the performance
index.

The top 20 have a total of 450
councillors of which 233 are ward councillors and 217 are proportional
councillors.

The bottom 20 have a total of 920
councillors of which 463 are ward councillors and 457 are proportional
councillors. The other striking
statistic to come out of the bottom 20 municipalities is that they are all held
by the ANC with overwhelming majorities.
In fact, at 281 the ANC have more proportional seats in these municipalities
than the total of 197 ward and proportional seats of all the other parties
combined. At a cost of around R122m proportional representation in these
municipalities is unaffordable, completely pointless, and in comparison with
the top 20 suggests that more actually provides less.

If you are
still not convinced, then you must be a politician. The rest of us have learned
a couple of things: first of all, that all the power lies with party leaders
and none with the electorate, which proves Mark Twain’s point that “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t
let us do it”; and second, that we must stop “the insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a
different result”.

We really need
to divert all our energy towards fixing the defective legislation, which should
also rid us of a satisfactory number of defective politicians. #PRMUSTFALL

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About Me

After retiring early, I became involved with the local ratepayers association. This is where I gained first-hand experience of the damage that can be done by proportional representation politicians at local government level. I have become increasingly frustrated with the widening disconnection between party-dominated politicians and the people they (mis)represent.